Barton, Derek Harold Richard (1918–1998)

English organic chemist. Barton investigated the stereochemistry of natural compounds. He showed that their biological activity often depends on the shapes of their molecules and the positions and orientations of key functional groups. He shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1969 for his creation of the branch of organic chemistry known as conformational analysis.

Barton was born in Gravesend, Kent, and studied at Imperial College, London. He held various professorships in the UK, beginning at Birkbeck College, London in 1953 and ending at the University of London from 1978, the same year that he was appointed director of the Institute for the Chemistry of Natural Substances in France.

While lecturing in the USA at Harvard (1949–50), Barton studied the different rates of reaction of certain steroids and their triterpenoid isomers (substances with the same composition but differing in the way their atoms are joined and arranged in space). He deduced that the difference in the spatial orientation of their functional groups accounts for their behaviour, and so developed the field that became known as conformational analysis.

Barton went on to examine many natural products, concluding that the structures of many phenols and alkaloids could be explained and predicted.

Barton also studied photochemical routes and unravelled the complex transformations that take place during photolysis. In 1959 (at Cambridge, Massachusetts) he devised a simple synthesis of the naturally occurring hormone aldosterone. He also worked on the antibiotics tetracycline and penicillin.